Methodology
This is a legal/government reference. An error here can cost someone weeks and a rejected visa, so every fact on the site traces to an official source and carries a verification date.
Where our facts come from
We use only primary sources. We never take a fee, address, or Hague status from a private apostille service — those are competitors and second-hand.
- Hague membership and entry-into-force dates: the HCCH status table for the Apostille Convention, and nothing else. Aggregator lists disagree with each other (we have seen 124, 129, and 130 in circulation); the HCCH table is the sole authority.
- The federal channel: the US Department of State, Office of Authentications pages on travel.state.gov — for the fee, Form DS-4194, the Sterling, Virginia mailing address, the Washington, DC walk-in address, and current processing times.
- State fees, offices, and times: each jurisdiction's own government page — the Secretary of State, or the specific authority where it differs (Georgia's GSCCCA, Michigan's Office of the Great Seal, New Jersey's Treasury, and the Lieutenant Governor's offices in Hawaii, Alaska, and Utah).
- Embassy legalization for non-Hague countries: each destination's own embassy website in Washington, DC.
What we do when a fact is uncertain
We would rather say "confirm this" than invent precision. Where an embassy's published fee is stale or ambiguous, we say so on the page and leave the number out rather than guess. Where a US territory's fee is not centrally published, its pages are marked provisional and are not treated as ranking targets until confirmed. A false freshness date on a page like this is worse than an honest "verify with the office."
How often we re-check
| Data | Cadence |
|---|---|
| HCCH status table (membership + dates) | Monthly, plus on each pending entry-into-force date (Viet Nam September 11, 2026; Thailand February 28, 2027) |
| US Department of State fee and processing times | Monthly |
| Top-10 states by population | Quarterly |
| Remaining states and territories | Twice a year |
| Embassy fees and procedures (launched non-Hague countries) | Quarterly for the busiest; twice a year for the rest |
How our statistics are derived
The figures on our apostille statistics page are computed at build time from the same data files that power every state and country page — none of them are typed in by hand, and a build-time audit re-derives each one from the raw data and fails the build if a published number stops matching. Rows without a published value are excluded from averages, with the real denominator stated in the sentence, rather than estimated. Those statistics are licensed CC BY 4.0: republish them freely, with a link to the statistics page as attribution.
How dates flow through the site
Every page's "last verified" date, its sitemap entry, and its structured-data dateModified all read from one field in the underlying data file. When we re-verify a fact, we update that one field and everything downstream updates with it. Pending accessions flip automatically on their entry-into-force date, so a country page and the checker change their answer on the right day without anyone editing prose.
The current site-wide verification high-water mark is July 13, 2026. See the full source list on the sources page, and our correction process on the about page.